How can case study research in the social sciences become more open?

Case studies form an important part of qualitative social science and are undertaken in diverse ways to meet different goals. Relatively numerous but shallow cases are used as ‘apt illustrations’ at one end of the spectrum. At the other end, one or a few ‘deep’ cases in ‘diagnostic’ mode often seek to show the holistic and necessary nature of causal connections in a given situation. There are also many intermediate forms of case, and strong connections now to mixed methods and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and set-defined cases.

Open social science aims to enhance the ease of reproducing and replicating all forms of case study evidence, and to strengthen the robustness and generalizability of studies using this key methods tool. Professor Patrick Dunleavy and Dr Tim Monteath led this seminar which covered such key steps as:

• ethical de-anonymization strategies allowing more evidence to be openly cited;
• pre-specifying hypotheses and propositions;
• making more explicit and ‘stress-testing’ the posited links between particular conditions and analytic judgements;
• stating the relative salience of holistic influences in a structured manner, not reliant on discretionary judgements by the analyst; and
• using open social science approaches for interview-based and documentation-based research (see here and forthcoming).

This event was part of a series of seminars organised to support the development of the CIVICA Research Open Science Handbook for the Social Sciences.